Here We Go Again
It’s the summer of 2003 and you’re trying to spit in my hair. I’m standing at the base of the big green slide on the playground, and you’re standing at the top of it. I grab hold of my friend’s hand and we run a few feet away to stand in the grass. You’re throwing mulch at us both now, and I’m trying to act as mad as I can but you’re wearing a black beanie cap over your long hair and you ride a skateboard and you’re probably just the coolest and cutest boy I’ve ever met. You always hang out with the older guys in our apartment complex, and right now they are standing behind you and laughing at me.
I’ve only known you a few weeks. I just moved to Long Island, and my mom wanted me to meet some of the kids in the complex before I start sixth grade next month. You’ve spent every day chasing me and teasing me, and sometimes I hear you tell the older boys how annoying I am.
But today your friends go home early, and so do mine. I tell you I’m not allowed to walk down the street to CVS without asking my mom, but you ask me to come with you and I can’t say no. When we get there you buy me an orange Fanta and teach me how to ride your skateboard in the parking lot.
The next day, when your friends come outside, you try to make me eat an ant off a tree and tell me I’m annoying.
***
It’s sometime in 2004. It’s getting dark and a little cold, so all of the younger kids have left the playground. We all climb up the slide and sit on the biggest platform, and our friends want to play truth or dare.
It’s your turn, and you say dare, which is weird because you almost always pick truth. My friend looks at me and smiles. We have discussed this a million times. If Danny ever says dare make him kiss me.
She dares you to kiss me on the cheek. You can’t stop laughing and making weird faces at me, and then you say you don’t want to play anymore because truth or dare is stupid. I roll my eyes and act like it was no big deal anyway.
I get up and say I’m going home. You stand up and say you’ll walk me to my apartment, and my stomach completely flips over inside me. You’re friends start teasing you, and for some reason you ignore them. You’ve never walked me home before, and we don’t say a word to each other on the short walk to my apartment.
When we get to my door I tell you goodnight and turn to walk inside, eager to get away because you’re making me so nervous. You tell me to wait, and when I turn around you’re looking at the ground, laughing. You finally calm down and look up, but then your mom’s car pulls up at the curb and you turn red and jump up against the wall like you’re a secret agent in some movie, hiding from your enemy. I can’t stop laughing, and your mom waves over and asks if you want anything from Taco Bell. She drives away when you nod, and when we are alone again you take a step toward me.
You stop smiling, and I think it’s weird how serious you look. I have to go inside.
You get really close to me and stare right into my eyes for a few seconds. I think I might throw up all over you if you don’t stop that. I don’t expect it when you lean in quickly and kiss me hard on the check. But before I can say anything, you run away.
***
It is Summer 2006 and I haven’t seen you in over a year. Your family moved, and even though it wasn’t too far away, we completely lost touch.
My mom finally breaks down and lets me make a Myspace, and I don’t know why, but something makes me type your name into the search bar. Only a few results pop up, and you’re right at the top of the list. Not many people have your weird last name.
I hesitate before I message you. I’m not the nerdy-looking blonde girl with big glasses anymore. Eighth grade is almost over, and I wanted a new look for high school. I bought all black clothes, got contacts, and dyed my hair bright pink.
I’m nervous for nothing. A few weeks after I first message you, we have plans to hang out.
When you knock on my door my stomach drops and I think I might throw up, but I don’t. Your hair is shorter now, and your voice is a little deeper. I’m surprised by how tall you are; you used to be shorter than me.
We decide to go sit by the playground, and on the way you stop me and ask if you can kiss me. It’s the first time I’ve ever been kissed on the lips, and I think it is adorable that you asked first. I’m too nervous to talk, so we don’t. You’re perfect.
We sit on a bench and I don’t think we could get any closer together if we tried. I just want to be near you, and close doesn’t feel close enough. I am just now realizing how badly I missed you while you were gone. Am I too young to be in love?
We sit like that for what feels like forever. I rest my head on your shoulder and you keep nuzzling your face in my hair. When we finally stand up your neck and cheek are stained pink from my hair-dye, the same way I have ruined my pillow, my mom’s couch, the shower, and even the house phone.
Right before your mom comes to pick you up, you ask me to be your girlfriend. I say yes, and you promise to visit me all the time.
But you don’t, because just a couple weeks later I realize that I am terrified of you and how nervous you make me, so I send you a Myspace message and say I want to break up.
***
It’s early in 2007, and I can’t stop thinking about you. Life has been hard lately. I look through old messages until I find your email address, and I ask if you want to talk. You ask me if I have Yahoo Messenger so we can talk easier. I don’t, but I make an account just for you.
Life has been hard for you too, and we stay up until almost five in the morning talking about how you’re scared of your dad, and how mine hasn’t talked to me in over a year, and about how I have no friends at school and have to talk to the guidance counselor once a week, and about how your depression makes you too anxious at school so you are home-tutored now. And how we are scared our parents will find out that we sometimes hurt ourselves. And how sometimes we want to just die, but maybe we won’t do anything stupid just yet because we have each other to talk to now.
My mom tells me to invite you over a few weeks later. She is probably just happy that I have someone to talk to and something to smile about for once. So you come over, and I make you watch Rent because it’s my favorite movie. You don’t understand what’s going on, so I explain it to you and I think you might just like hearing me talk so much.
You kiss me by the front door before you leave, and it’s a real kiss. Mouth open and everything. I haven’t felt this happy in a very long time.
You message me that same night and tell me you love me. I love you too. And for a while we continue to be happy. But a few months later I find out that my family is moving to Westchester. And we have to break up, because it’s two and a half hours away. I feel worse off than I did before we started talking again, and I promise myself I won’t try to find you in the future.
***
In the beginning of 2009 I am dating some varsity baseball player I have nothing in common with, and I never think about you. Until one day my dad tries to call me for the first time in almost four years and life is feeling a little too hard to take and I desperately need someone to talk to. I sit down at the computer, thinking I’ll message my boyfriend and ask him to come over. But for some reason I go to my email and type your name into the search bar, never expecting you to respond.
A few hours later I’m sitting on the floor in the corner of the hall and you’re on the phone and it’s the first time I’ve laughed this hard in forever, and when my mom walks by she whispers Here we go again and I try to ignore it.
You tell me you still love to write, so we both share some of our poetry and until now I’ve never realized how much I’ve written about you, convincing myself it wasn’t about anybody.
My mom starts telling me that I should leave Steven because it’s obvious I love you, and within a few weeks I’ve dumped him and you’ve dumped that girl Michole. But we still don’t ever talk about how we feel, because I’m in Westchester and you’re on Long Island and we’ve been here before.
But my mom and her boyfriend are going to Long Island for Easter, and they ask if I want to be dropped off at your house for the day.
***
April 12, 2009. Easter came quickly. I can hardly breathe when we get to your neighborhood, and I threaten several times to throw up in the backseat. My mom says she’s really excited for me. I think she knows how happy you’ve always been able to make me.
The walk up your driveway seems like it take forever, and when I knock you immediately run to the glass door with your two dogs and make a ridiculous face at me and stick your tongue out before you let me in. It’s something you totally would have done when we were twelve. And now we’re almost seventeen and here we are.
I never want you to let go when you hug me, but you do. You can’t stop laughing, like that nervous laugh on the day you first kissed my check and ran away.
We decide to go for a walk, and it’s hard to talk to you. We spend hours together on the phone every night, but this is the first time I’ve seen you in almost two years. You try to make jokes, and you make fun of my shirt, which has a big peace sign on the front of it, and you’re acting like we are kids again. But I don’t mind. I missed this.
When we get back to your house you take me to your room and we watch a movie. I don’t remember what it was called. It has John Cusack in it and some mean little kid on a bike. We sit awkwardly in two different chairs, and we don’t talk and we don’t look at each other because right before you turned the movie on you asked if I wanted to be your girlfriend, and I was too shocked to talk so I just kind of stared at you so you turned the TV on as fast as you could.
But when the movie is over you turn around immediately. Well?
And I don’t know if you’re asking me if I’ll be your girlfriend again or if you’re asking if I like the movie, but I take a chance and say Yes and you make me stand up and just like that one time when your face was pink like my hair you actually ask to kiss me. You are really just adorable.
Then we lie in your bed and make out and cuddle and nap until my mom comes to get me. And this is the first time I have ever felt like you’re really mine for good. I’m never letting go.
***
It’s April 4, Easter of 2010, sometime between twelve and one in the morning. Your hair is a mess and I’m in my underwear and one of your huge, brown, Dave Matthews Band t-shirts. I’m staying at your house for the weekend, like I do almost every week now. I am playing with your video camera and trying to make you say something but you can’t stop laughing at me and I am so in love with you.
Your mom knocks on the door, and in a high-pitched voice says The Easter Bunny is here! Your mom is fucking insane, but I’ve grown to love it. She walks in and I throw the camera to you because I get excited when I see she has Easter baskets for us. A bunch of candy and some CDs. She made one for your best friend too, and with his candy he got rolling paper. Because your mom is fucking nuts.
She leaves and we sit in your bed and pig out on our candy and you tell me I still act like a little kid when I get excited. And you love my laugh and wish I just smiled like this forever. I snatch the camera from you and pan around your bedroom. It’s small with one huge window right next to the bed, and there is so much of me here. The koi fish painting I made you for your birthday and all of my hair-ties next to your mirror and a bunch of my books stacked next to yours in the windowsill. I lie on my stomach next to you in bed and put the camera in front of us. Let’s make a video to our future selves.
We talk to the camera for what feels like forever, reminding ourselves to never leave one another and to always follow our hearts and never lose sight of who we are. I tell myself that by the time I’m watching this video again I better be covered in tattoos and you just keep telling me to love you forever. I say I always will.
When we run out of things to say we turn the camera off and fall asleep.
The next morning we don’t feel like going anywhere, so we take all your sheets and hang them up to blackout the windows. We whisper to each other in the dark and watch movies and have sex all day long, and only leave your room to ask your mom for the food we like from that one Mexican place.
That night, when we take the sheets down because it’s already dark enough, we lie on our backs in your bed holding hands and stare at the ceiling. We talk about poetry and we listen to Pink Floyd and Nick Drake and make so many plans for the future. We will move to Vermont and get a canoe and nobody will ever hurt us again.
***
July 2010. I love you so much it hurts. But you don’t feel it anymore because all you think about now is that bad thing that happened to you that one time. The thing we never talk about and the reason you cry sometimes when I touch you too firmly on your shoulders. I know it was terrible Danny, but you can’t just shut me out.
Your friends have all left for the night and I’m pissed because you’re high as fuck and you promised me you would stop doing that. We lock ourselves in your bedroom and you cry into the pillow and I’m scared because this happens all the time now and I just want to make it better, but I can’t.
You won’t talk to me, and you can barely breathe. You lie on your back and start punching yourself in the head so hard I think you might actually knock yourself out. I jump on top of you in bed and grab your arms and try to pin them down, but you knock me over and I hit my elbow and leg on the side of your bed. When the bruises form in a couple days I won’t tell you about them, and I tell my mom I fell off a bike.
***
It’s September 2010 and I’m at college now. We had a fight a few days ago because you were drinking and driving with one of your friends and I told you that you were being really fucking stupid so you broke up with me. You regretted it the next day, but I’ve been ignoring you.
I’m so mad at you for doing this to us. For always telling me I’m too uptight and for not being there for me anymore. For not being normal.
Fuck it. I’m done being responsible and I’m done trying so hard to love you. So tonight I find myself in another’s guy room and later I send a Facebook message to my friend Amanda about it because I have never done anything like that.
I tell her how he invited me to his room to watch Clerks, and how we didn’t say a word the whole time but he kept his hand on my thigh. And I tell her that after the movie was over he kissed me and I let him take my shirt off and how I tried to fuck him but he couldn’t get hard so I left.
And it doesn’t even occur to me that you still have all my login information and check my messages every night.
***
It’s a couple nights later in 2010. My phone rings and it’s you, and at first I don’t want to answer but it feels weird that you’re calling me so I do.
I have no idea what you’re saying, Danny. You are sobbing so hard that I worry you can’t breathe, and you are trying to talk but nothing makes sense. You say something about marrying me and then I hear something fall. I think you’re saying that we will never find you. I listen for a few minutes, begging you to please calm down. But even when you stop crying it is hard to understand you.
You say something about driving to the woods. Alcohol. Too many pills. And then I hear what sounds like the phone falling and you stop responding when I call for you.
I immediately call your mom, and she screams for your dad or your brother or someone and hangs up. And leaves me alone. And I am sitting in the common area of my residence hall in the middle of the night, crying uncontrollably, so someone takes me to sit with the RD, who is very nice but keeps trying to make me call some hotline when all I can think about it you. Why did you fucking do this, Danny?
Finally, your mom calls. She is being crazy and has the phone on speaker and I can barely hear her, but she tells me that they found you. You are laying in the backseat and they are rushing to the hospital and she wants me to talk to you, just to keep you awake while they drive. I am begging you, please just stay awake for me. Please. As I start crying you mutter something about me with another guy, asking if I sucked someone else’s dick. I don’t know what to say and your mom is freaking out and I am just now realizing that you know about that guy I almost fucked a few nights ago and this is all my fault so I hang up.
Your mom calls later and says you’re going to be alright and I hang up before she can ask me anything else. The last thing that you’ll ever need again is me.
***
December 2013. I haven’t seen you since before freshman year and I’m due to graduate in a semester and I have my own life now. Like a real adult life with a live-in boyfriend and a year lease on an apartment and bills and a new puppy and plans for the future. And I love him, I really, really do. But sometimes I think about you and he hates that. Two weeks ago I heard Tangerine by Led Zeppelin and thought of you and I just sat in the bottom of a hot shower and cried. I thought it was weird when my phone buzzed. Nobody ever texts me late at night.
And when I picked up my phone from the bathroom floor and saw your name on the screen I almost threw up.
We have plans to meet in the city soon after New Years, and I don’t know what I am expecting from seeing you. I just know that I have to.
Here we go again.
-S.L.Olsen Dec 2013